Essays on Biblical Interpretation by Paul Ricoeur
Chapter 3: The Hermeneutics of Testimony
I. THE PROBLEM
I am proceeding directly to the end of this meditation by asking: What sort of philosophy makes a problem of testimony? I answer: A
philosophy for which the question of the absolute is a proper question, a philosophy which seeks to join an experience of the absolute to the idea of the absolute, a philosophy which finds neither in example nor in symbol the depth of this experience.
I have encountered this philosophy in the work of Jean Nabert, the only one, to my knowledge, who has developed the theme of a hermeneutics of the absolute and of testimony.1 The pages which follow are inspired by this work, to the reading of which are joined semantic,
epistemological, and exegetical preoccupations of the most personal character.
A Philosophy for Which the Question of the Absolute is a Proper
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Question.
Testimony should be a philosophical problem and not limited to legal or historical contexts where it refers to the account of a witness who
reports what he has seen. The term testimony should be applied to words, works, actions, and to lives which attest to an intention, an inspiration, an idea at the heart of experience and history which nonetheless transcend experience and history. The philosophical
problem of testimony is the problem of the testimony of the absolute or, better, of absolute testimony of the absolute. The question is only proper if the absolute makes sense for consciousness. But it makes sense
beyond the critique of the ontological argument and proofs of the
existence of God, beyond the debacle of onto-theology, if reflection, by an asceticism as intellectual as moral, is susceptible of elevating self- consciousness to an "original affirmation" which is truly an absolute affirmation of the absolute.
A Philosophy Which Seeks to join an Experience of the Absolute to the Idea of the Absolute.
Original affirmation has all the characteristics of an absolute affirmation of the absolute, but it will neither be able to go beyond a purely internal act not susceptible of being expressed externally, nor even of being maintained internally. Original affirmation has something of the indefinitely inaugural about it, and only concerns the idea that the self makes of itself. This original affirmation, for a reflexive philosophy, is in no sense an experience. Although numerically identical with real consciousness in each person, it is the act which accomplishes the negation of the limitations which affect individual destiny. It is
divestment (depouillement).2 It is by this "divestment" that reflection is brought to the encounter with contingent signs that the absolute, in its generosity, allows to appear of itself. This divestment (depouillement) is not only ethical but speculative; it is when the thought of the
unconditioned has lost all support in the transcendent objects of metaphysics, when it has renounced all the objectifications that
understanding imposes. It is then that the claim of the absolute, reduced to the depth of an act immanent to each of our operations, remains steady for something like an experience of the absolute in testimony.
A Philosophy Which Finds Neither in Example nor in Symbol the Depth of this Experience.
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Why, in fact, does not the example fulfill this role of an experience of the absolute? In Kant, does not the "sublime" offer us the model of a veneration which proceeds through the exemplary action of a few heroes of the moral life toward the very source of these eminent acts? For at least two reasons, the notion of example falls short of that of testimony.
In the exemplary action, the case gives way to the rule, the individual to the law. Consciousness is only increased by itself and by the norm that it already implies. The "exemplarity" of the example does not constitute a manifestation of original affirmation.
More seriously, the examples of moral sublimity attach our veneration to the order of morality. But the encounter of evil, in us and outside of us, opens under us not the abyss of the unjustifiable, i.e., the abyss of that which makes an exception of every attempt at justification, not only by the norm but by the failure of the norm. The unjustifiable forces a giving up of every cupido sciendi, which bears reflection to the very threshold of theodicy. This ultimate divestment (depouillement) disposes reflection to receive the meaning of events or perfectly contingent acts which would attest that the unjustifiable is overcome here and now. This attestation could not be reduced to the illustration of these norms that the unjustifiable has placed in confusion; the avowal of evil waits for our regeneration more than the examples of sublimity. It waits for words and especially actions which would be absolute actions in the sense that the root of the unjustifiable will be there manifestly and visibly uprooted.
The same reasons which leave the example short of testimony also indicate the distance from symbol to testimony. The example is historic but is obliterated as the case before the rule. The symbol is not
obliterated so easily; its double meaning, its opacity, renders it
inexhaustible and causes it never to cease giving rise to thought. But it lacks — or can lack — historic density; its meaning matters more than its historicity. As such it constitutes instead a category of the productive imagination. Absolute testimony, on the contrary, in concrete singularity gives a caution to the truth without which its authority remains in
suspense. Testimony, each time singular, confers the sanction of reality on ideas, ideals, and modes of being that the symbol depicts and
discovers for us only as our most personal possibilities.
But we immediately see the enormity of the paradox that the philosophy of testimony evokes. "Does one have the right," Nabert asks us in
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L’Essai sur le mal, "to invest with an absolute character a moment of history?"3 How, in fact, are we to conjoin the interiority of primary affirmation and the exteriority of acts and of existences that are said to give testimony of the absolute? This is the paradox that a hermeneutics of testimony sets itself to resolve.
We will follow the following order. In the second part we will start with the ordinary notion of testimony and apply to it the methods of semantic analysis. We will thus be forced to limit the conditions of meaning without which we cannot speak of testimony. These conditions of meaning cannot be abolished but must be retained in the ultimate concept of absolute testimony.
In the third part we will have recourse to the exegesis of testimony in the biblical prophets and in the New Testament. We will be forced by this new method to give an account of the change of meaning by which we pass from the ordinary sense of testimony to the prophetic and
kerygmatic sense. But we will ask ourselves at the same time if and how the conditions of meaning which delimit the ordinary notion of
testimony are recaptured in this new signification.
In the fourth part we will return, armed with this dual analysis, to the initial paradox which has set this inquiry in motion, and we will define the philosophical hermeneutics of testimony which has given its title to this essay. The central theme of this will be the combining of primary affirmation with testimony under the heading of interpretation.